Sunday 11 December 2011

Poetry is what gets lost in the translation

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Poetry is what gets lost in the translation. Robert Frost.


Or else the translation is a poem in its own right. E.g., Horace - Odes, Book 3, Ode 29: Happy the Man - trans. Dryden

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heav'n itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

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